The Insanity of Protesting Against Putin

On Tuesday afternoon, when Ludmila Moskalenko, the judge in the trial of Mikhail Kosenko, began to read her decision, it was hard for anyone—including Kosenko himself—to hear her. The courtroom in Moscow was packed with journalists, activists, and supporters standing on tables and leaning against the walls; the temperature in the small hall was something between the inside of a parked car in the summer and a Russian banya. Moskalenko’s voice was a soft, barely audible drone, as if the verdict were being delivered by a robot on the verge of powering down.

Kosenko, who is thirty-eight years old, was charged with assaulting a police officer and participating in “mass riots.” His trial was one part of a larger case stemming from a protest on May 6, 2012, when a march against President Vladimir Putin—whose inauguration for a third term was scheduled for the next day—turned violent, with protesters and police clashing near Bolotnaya Square, just across the river from the Kremlin.

So far, twenty-eight people have been charged as part of the case, which the state has tried to present as a planned conspiracy—a putsch plotted from abroad and executed from within. Kosenko is the first to receive a verdict, perhaps setting a precedent for others. At the very least, his case sends a signal about the Kremlin’s rapaciousness not just in prosecuting the Bolotnaya defendants but in its desire to clamp down on all those in the opposition or sympathetic to it.

When I arrived at the courtroom, I sat next to a woman named Galina Sergeeva, who introduced herself as Kosenko’s aunt. When he was a child, she told me, Kosenko loved to read, and always had his head in one history book or another. “You could say he was a nerd,” she said, and went on to call her nephew “a real humanist, without any aggression.” As the end of his high-school years grew near, in the late nineteen-eighties, she said, Kosenko could have easily enrolled in the history program at Moscow State University. But then, she added, her voice dropping, “he went to the Army.” In the military, he was severely beaten by fellow cadets and suffered a concussion.

The state declared him a medical invalid. Kosenko was diagnosed with mild schizophrenia, and he would go for routine outpatient treatment for more than a decade. But he lived a quiet, normal life, primarily staying inside the Moscow apartment he shared with his sister, Ksenia, where he listened to the radio and read books on Communist history. In late 2011 and early 2012, when a large-scale opposition movement broke out into the open in Moscow, it gave Kosenko a chance to take part in something, to be among like-minded people and express his political ideas. “It took him a while to digest it all,” Ksenia had told me last spring. But he would talk about “how great it was, how inspiring.”

Kosenko went by himself to the protest on May 6th. What happened that afternoon at Bolotnaya Square remains unclear: police changed the route of the march without telling organizers or the public, and the ensuing violence seemed more confused and spontaneous than organized. Kosenko was caught up in the clashes and arrested. He was released the next day and fined five hundred rubles, around fifteen dollars. Then, a month later, on the evening of June 8, 2012, the buzzer rang at Ksenia’s apartment. Police poured in and grabbed Mikhail. He went stiff. “Please just don’t make a mess,” he asked as they walked him out.

According to Kosenko’s lawyers, in the early days of his detention, investigators were barely concerned with Kosenko’s medical condition—or, for that matter, with Kosenko at all. Instead they asked him about his political allegiances and what he thought of various opposition leaders, including Alexey Navalny, who had been toward the front of the May 6th march. (Navalny came to court for the verdict on Tuesday, and later pronounced that Kosenko carried himself “calmly and courageously,” setting an “example for us all.”)

At first, Kosenko was not given the antidepressant he had taken regularly for more than ten years. Ksenia visited him in jail and thought he looked terrible. After an hour-long exam, experts from the state-run Serbsky Center—the same psychiatric hospital that sent dissidents to psychiatric hospitals in Soviet times—pronounced Kosenko a “danger to himself and others” and declared him mentally incompetent. That meant his case would be heard separately from the rest, and a guilty verdict would send him not to prison but to a psychiatric ward. He immediately protested the diagnosis.

Kosenko’s trial began last November. The indictment against him was confusing; for starters, Kosenko was accused of beating a police officer and causing a concussion, but the text only mentions Kosenko striking him in the body and arm. The evidence began to look even more flimsy as the process wore on—in another criminal-justice system, it might have looked as if the case were falling apart.

Under questioning, one police witness said he didn’t recognize Kosenko and didn’t see who had been beating his fellow officer. The alleged victim himself, Alexander Kazmin, a member of a special brigade of riot police, said he didn’t remember Kosenko striking him; Kosenko had been “simply standing nearby,” he said. “Even if Kosenko himself inflicted injury, I don’t wish him harm,” he added. “I don’t want comrade Kosenko to sit in prison.” The only police witness who identified Kosenko as Kazmin’s assailant was questioned in a closed session, with everyone else in court that day forced into the hallway.

The rest of the case didn’t look much better. One of the only pieces of material evidence the prosecution could point to was that during a search of his apartment, investigators found the same clothes Kosenko had been wearing at the protest on May 6th. Moreover, the head of Russia’s independent psychiatry association, Yuri Savenko, criticized the Serbsky Institute’s diagnosis, saying it represented a flawed and “punitive” methodology, which was “emblematic of the use of psychiatry for political purposes.”

Last week, Kosenko had a chance to deliver his last word in court, which, like defendants in politically motivated trials from the anti-Soviet dissidents of the nineteen-sixties to the women of Pussy Riot, he used not to address the particulars of his case but as a chance to hold forth on larger questions of Russia’s political trajectory. “Our people have become used to suffering,” he said, going on to talk of the country’s “Eastern model of society,” in which “a lack of freedom is exchanged for a comfortable life.” He said Russia needed a “rotation” of power, not the “eternal tenure of a single regime.” If nothing else—as if it hadn’t been clear long before—these were not the words of an unstable, dangerously clouded mind.

Not that any of this gave Kosenko, Ksenia, or the hundreds of people who gathered outside of the Zamoskvorechye court in central Moscow on Tuesday much hope. The Russian criminal-justice system is a hulking, unreasoning machine that, once started, is only capable of moving forward. This is as much a function of bureaucratic inertia and solidarity—no judge wants to ruin the statistics of a prosecutor, much less his or her own—as pressure from the top. But the clear political resonance of the Bolotnaya case only made Kosenko’s fate all the more predetermined.

By 5 P.M., as Moskalenko reached the end of her nearly two-hour reading of the verdict, it was clear that Kosenko had been found guilty and would be headed to a psychiatric clinic. She finished to cries of “shame” from the audience in the hall. Kosenko silently turned around to allow bailiffs to put handcuffs back on him and lead him out into the corridor. The sentence is, in a way, indefinite—Kosenko will be committed to forced psychiatric care as long as doctors deem necessary.

Punitive psychiatry is nothing new in Moscow. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, it was one of the Soviet state’s preferred methods for isolating and pressuring individual dissidents. In 1969, the Serbsky Center (then called the Institute) claimed that Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a dissident who published a samizdat recording protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia, suffered from a psychological affliction. In her book on the abuse of Soviet mental hospitals, she includes a description of how, “under the guise of treatment, those unwilling to deny their beliefs are subjected to physical tortures, injections of large doses of chlorpromazine and sulfazin, which cause shock and severe physical disorders.”

Back then, in however twisted a way, the Kremlin rationalized holding dissidents in psychiatric wards because it saw their thinking as somehow improper—the Soviet state stood for something, and they were indeed, you could say, of a different mind. With Kosenko, however, it’s not even obvious what his ultimate sin was, other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time one day last May. And that is an ailment that will prove hard to cure with psychiatric treatment.

Photograph by Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty.

Joshua Yaffa is a New Yorker contributor based in Moscow. He is also a New America fellow.